Staten Island Museum Is Reopening in Snug Harbor Complex

Installing lighting at the Staten Island Museum.Credit
Andrew White for The New York Times

Sure, the Staten Island Museum has long owned a variety of treasures: a 16th-century suit of armor, a wooden statue from the 12th dynasty of ancient Egypt, a collection of portraits of prominent people from the borough.

But much of that was overlooked as visitors focused on the museum’s expansive array of local animal and plant specimens: 35,000 examples of cicadas and more than 10,000 mollusk shells, not to mention bird nests, algae and slime molds.

“They know us for bugs,” said Diane Matyas, the museum’s vice president for exhibitions and programs.

Ms. Matyas and her colleagues expect that to begin changing this weekend.

The museum, housed for decades in a 1918 building perched on a hill in the St. George neighborhood, a short walk up from the ferry terminal, will reopen on Saturday in a larger home a mile and a half away at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden.

Its new location, a landmarked 19th-century structure, known as Building A, is on a property bequeathed in 1801 by the New York merchant Robert Richard Randall “for the purpose of maintaining and supporting aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors.”

Workers have spent four years restoring the historic exterior and gutting the interior, creating a modern five-level space behind the building’s majestic columned facade. With the move, the museum gains more than 10,000 additional square feet of public space in which to display art and other objects, many of which have been out of the public eye for decades.

The institution also expects to benefit from the pull of Snug Harbor’s other attractions. An affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, Snug Harbor consists of an 83-acre campus with 28 buildings, including a music hall, an art lab, nine botanical gardens, the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, the Noble Maritime Collection, the Snug Harbor Artist Residency Program and the Staten Island Children’s Museum.

The renovations to Building A, handled by Gluckman Tang Architects, cost $30.5 million, of which $24.4 million came from the city.

“It’s the kind of museum that’s going to fit comfortably into that setting,” said Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner. “It’s doing what they couldn’t accomplish in the facility that they already had.”

The new location is expected to boost museum attendance, which was 32,000 last year, not counting visits by 7,000 schoolchildren. City officials predict that a new Ferris wheel under construction in nearby St. George, expected to be the world’s tallest, at 630 feet, will draw additional visitors to the neighborhood. An outlet mall and a 200-room hotel are also planned for the area.

“I’m a believer in the transformative possibilities of that wheel,” Mr. Finkelpearl said. “That’s going to bring a lot of new people to Staten Island.”

Photo

Cheryl Adolph, the Staten Island Museum’s interim leader.Credit
Andrew White for The New York Times

Founded in 1881 by a group of local naturalists concerned with preserving examples of the region’s plant and animal species, the museum soon branched out into other collecting areas. It has, for example, a varied archive of maps, deeds, census records and family Bibles, as well as more than 60,000 images, including photographs, negatives and tintypes.

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Also on view will be paintings from the Hudson River School, newly commissioned works by living artists, tapestries and Japanese needlework, most of which has been donated by collectors. “It really is a community museum,” said Cheryl Adolph, the museum’s interim president and chief executive.

The museum’s historic building and eclectic collections made the design a challenge. It “was not the typical exhibition program,” said Mr. Gluckman, the lead architect. “It was a mix. It needed flexible spaces.”

Mr. Gluckman likened the project to his firm’s renovation of the Cooper Hewitt museum, completed last December in the Carnegie Mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“It was both a structural and mechanical intervention,” while “making sure those interventions are invisible,” he said. “There’s a lot underneath the plaster and the woodwork that allows it to perform the way a museum building has to perform.”

The museum’s exhibits were designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.

The former building in St. George will become a ferry museum and a welcome center. “We want it to be that gateway location,” Ms. Adolph said.

The new museum will be climate-controlled, with a geothermal heating and cooling system that will enable it to exhibit precious works from other institutions. “We couldn’t borrow things in the old facility,” Ms. Matyas said.

Yet the museum’s operations remain modest, with just 16 full-time employees and an annual budget of $1.2 million that is expected to increase to $1.8 million in the new building. “We know how to do a lot with very little,” Ms. Adolph said.

For some, there is a poignancy to the completion of the new building: Elizabeth Egbert, the museum’s former president and chief executive, had been pushing for a new home since 1977 and died last year from multiple myeloma at the age of 69. One of the new galleries is named after her.

This weekend’s opening fulfills Ms. Egbert’s longtime goal of seeing the museum transcend its limitations and evolve into something more than an outpost that hosts an annual “fence” art show and weekly bird walks.

“The community gets to see the stuff we’ve had in storage forever,” Ms. Matyas said.

“It gets away from being a backwater,” she added, “and gets people looking at the beautiful things that came here.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 19, 2015, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Museum Gets Room to Breathe. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe